The translation told an eerie story of a group of beings who claimed to have come from star system Sirius and crash-landed on Earth about twelve thousand years ago. Unable to repair their craft, this group attempted to make friends with the mountain tribes but were hunted down and killed due to their nonhuman features. Locals buried them with circular holed stones strikingly identical to some UFO descriptions. Since this account was not compatible with the Western worldview, it, too, was dismissed, but curiously, the mountainous crash site remains off limits to foreigners.
THE ANUNNAKI: IMPROVING THE BREED?
I
N SEVERAL ACCOUNTS ETCHED PERMANENTLY INTO THEIR CLAY
tablets, the ancient Sumerian scribes gave more detail as to the source of their knowledge. They wrote that 432,000 years before the Great Flood, the Anunnaki arrived and taught them the basics of civilization.
According to the interpretations of Zecharia Sitchin and many others, the term
Anunnaki
means “those who came from the heavens to the Earth.” In Sitchin’s narrative, these were astronauts from the planet Nibiru who traveled through the Great Bracelet (the asteroid belt) and initially landed in the Persian Gulf. There they began to colonize and search for gold. But strikes broke out over the hard work, and it was decided to engineer a slave race by manipulating the DNA of primitives on Earth. Thereafter, kings and dynasties were established among the new hybrids, which led to conflicts, warfare, and widespread devastation.
Michael Tellinger noted that Zulu creation legends agree with Sitchin’s interpretation of the Sumerian tablets.
Most of African mythology speaks about the same things, the sky
gods
the
abelungu
who came down from the sky. They created the people, to mine gold. The Zulu people, people from the sky. The
abelungu
have the same aspects as ascribed to the Anunnaki in the Sumerian tablets
.
Credo Mutwa [an African shaman] tells us
Abantu
in Zulu means the children of Antu. Antu is the Sumerian Goddess of the Abzu—where the gold came from. Lord Enki is also known as Enkei as the
creator-god
, the Sumerian medicine man. He cloned a species. His symbol is the medical symbol
,
caduceus. This is one of the oldest symbols on the earth encoded with so much knowledge and information we can spend a lecture on it alone.
According to Sitchin’s interpretations of Sumerian texts, about 450,000 years ago, during Earth’s Pleistocene ice age, the highly developed inhabitants of Nibiru—the Anunnaki—journeyed to Earth as the two planets came into proximity. Their initial landings were made in the Persian Gulf, just as our own astronauts at first splashed down in the ocean.
Logically, these ancient astronauts would have sought a base camp that could provide moderate weather and a good source of water and fuel. Only one location met all these criteria—the Fertile Crescent, which included the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys in Mesopotamia.
With the supreme Nibirian ruler, Anu—or An or El, depending on the source—supervising their effort from the home planet, the Anunnaki began a systematic colonization of Earth under the leadership of Anu’s two sons, Enlil and Enki. All of the Anunnaki leaders were later to assume the role of “gods,” or Nefilim, to their human subjects.
Nefilim
was translated by almost all ancient writers as those who had “fallen.” In religious terms, they were thought to be angels who fell from the grace of God. But “fallen” can also be seen as those who came down, and in more recent times, the term has taken on the meaning of giants who were a hybrid of two species.
In the tablets’ story, Enlil was the mission commander, while Enki served as executive and science officer. There was immediate and long-standing antagonism between the two half-brothers, due to Nibirian protocol. As in later Earth dynasties, the firstborn, Enki, was relegated to secondary status because his mother was not the official wife of Anu. This removed him from the royal line of succession. Yet it was Enki who led the first expedition to Earth.
Enki was both scientist and engineer. Under his leadership, the marshes on the northern shore of the Persian Gulf were drained, dikes were constructed, and irrigation systems were dug, as well as canals connecting the Tigris with the Euphrates. Reinforcements later arrived under the leadership of Enki’s firstborn son, Marduk.
There is no doubt that the Anunnaki were real and important. The prologue to the
Lawcode of Hammurabi
refers to these same Anunnaki overlords, stating,
When exalted Anu, king of the divinities [the Anunnaki], and Enlil, lord of heaven and earth, the determiner of the destinies of the land, determined for Marduk, the first-born of Enki, the dominion over the whole of humankind, made him the greatest among the deities, called Babylon by its exalted name, made it supreme in the world, and established for him in its midst an eternal kingship, whose foundations are as firm as heaven and earth, then it was that Anu and Enlil named me, Hammurabi, the devout and god-fearing prince, to promote the welfare of the people, to cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil, that the strong might not oppress the weak, to rise like the sun over the black-headed people, and to light up the land.
The translations by Sitchin and others have gathered many detractors, especially over the depiction of the Anunnaki as extraterrestrials. Michael Heiser, who earned degrees in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Semitic languages and was one of Sitchin’s most vociferous critics, stated on his website, SitchinIsWrong.com, “that what Sitchin has written about Nibiru, the Anunnaki, the book of Genesis, the Nephilim, and a host of other things has absolutely no basis in the real data of the ancient world.”
In an open letter to Sitchin, now addressed to “Ancient Astronaut Enthusiast” following Sitchin’s death in 2010, Heiser argued that the name Anunnaki appears nowhere in the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature published on the Internet by the University of Oxford.
While technically this may be true, the term
Anuna gods
appears numerous times in the literature and obviously could be collectivized into the plural term
Anunnaki.
One example of this term from the Oxford Sumerian texts recounts the boasts of Enki, who proclaimed, “With An the king, on An’s dais, I oversee justice. With Enlil, looking out over the lands, I decree good destinies. He has placed in my hands the decreeing of fates in the place where the sun rises. I am cherished by Nintur. I am named with a good name by Ninhursaga. I am the leader of the Anuna gods. I was born as the firstborn son of holy An.”
Naturally, no reputable scientist who desires to protect conventional textbooks and his funding sources would publicly admit to subscribing to Sitchin’s theories, yet many thousands have followed Sitchin’s work, some researchers augmenting the details of his narrative. Author, psychologist, and minister Paul Von Ward spoke for many when he wrote, “Although I do not agree with his cosmology … his elucidation of historical details and connection of them to other fields of knowledge stand up under comparative review with the work of other scholars. His summary of information relating to the ‘olden gods’ known in Sumeria as the Anunnaki presents a cohesive and defensible mixture of textual material and judicious interpretation.”
C. L. Turnage, an author who has studied more than three hundred translations of ancient Mesopotamian and Vedic writings, including the extrabiblical
Book of Enoch
, wrote, “After studying [Sitchin’s] theory, I began my own contemplation of the pre-biblical Babylonian
Epic of Creation
or
Enuma Elish
. It was from a study of this narrative that Sitchin became aware of the planet Nibiru and its establishment within our own solar system. This tale was originally written on seven clay tablets, each corresponding to a ‘day’ of creation. … The creation of man was recorded on the sixth tablet, while the seventh was reserved for the exaltation of the Babylonian national deity Marduk, the ‘creator god.’ After my own study of these chronicles, I concurred with Sitchin’s findings. It does appear that the first three chapters of Genesis, particularly the seven days of creation, were actually derived from the older creation epic, and other chronicles—then revamped to meet Hebrew theology. Why would the Hebrews borrow the creation story from older Mesopotamian texts? Was it because they worshipped one of the Mesopotamian deities themselves?”
Over thousands of years Earth time, according to the Sumerian narrative, the Anunnaki continued to put a thriving colony in place, and their attention turned to their primary objective—gold.
Some researchers have composed elaborate metaphysical explanations for Anunnaki activities on Earth, many having to do with energy fields and spiritual planes disrupted by the passing of Nibiru and the creation of Earth. One theory was that the more highly evolved Anunnaki were attempting to rescue “lost souls” left behind after the planetary collision.
But more documented and acceptable is the idea of Sitchin and others that these colonists were after Earth’s mineral wealth—particularly gold—for use on their home planet. “The Anunnaki sought gold to save their atmosphere, which had apparently sprung leaks similar to those we have created in ours by damaging the Earth’s ozone layer with hydrofluorocarbons,” explained author Lloyd Pye. “The Anunnaki solution was to disperse extremely tiny flakes of gold into their upper atmosphere to patch holes. … Ironically, modern scientists contend that if we are ever forced to repair our own damaged ozone layer, tiny particulates of gold shot into the upper atmosphere would be the best way to go about it.”
This theory is not so far-fetched when one considers that in 1997 a research team led by the physicist Edward Teller, known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, proposed various methods for controlling solar radiation, including the seeding of heavy metals, such as gold particles, into the upper atmosphere. Also, it is known that gold is an excellent conductor of electromagnetic energy, and it never rusts. In fact, in April 2009, President Obama’s science adviser, John P. Holdren, publicly suggested that heavy-metal “pollutants” be sprayed into the upper atmosphere to create a heat shield to retard perceived “global warming.”
But when the Anunnaki attempted to retrieve gold from the Persian Gulf by an extraction process, it proved inefficient and time-consuming. Anu, along with his heir Enlil, visited the colony and assigned Enki to find more gold. Enlil was placed in overall command of the Earth colony while Enki led a foray to Africa and eventually to South America, where he set up gold-mining operations. Proof of such early gold mining has come from scientific studies conducted for the Anglo-American Corporation, a leading South African mining company, in the 1970s. According to South African author Michael Tellinger, company scientists discovered evidence of thousands of ancient mining operations, some dated as far back as 100,000 BC. Similar ancient mine excavations have been found in Central and South America. They indicate that the Anunnaki mining efforts were worldwide and may go far in explaining the early diffusion of humans.
Further substantiation of such wide-ranging travel may be found by comparing the names of ancient Mesopotamian cities and localities as recorded by the second-century AD geographer Ptolemy to counterparts for gold-mining sites in Central America:
MESOPOTAMIAN NAME | CENTRAL AMERICAN NAME |
Chol | Chol-ula |
Colua | Colua-can |
Zuivana | Zuivan |
Cholima | Colima |
Zalissa | Xalisco |
The raw mined ore was then carried from the far-flung mines by cargo craft back to Mesopotamia for smelting and processing into hourglass-shaped ingots called
zag
, or “purified precious.” Engravings of such ingots are numerous, and some of the actual ingots have been found in archaeological excavations.
In an effort to ease the increasing rivalry between the half-brothers Enlil and Enki, their father, Anu, placed Enlil in charge of the Mesopotamian colony E-din—perhaps the basis for the biblical Eden—while assigning Enki to Ab-zu, or Africa, the “land of the mines.”
A number of writers believe that the Anunnaki mined gold on Earth for more than a hundred thousand years, until the rank-and-file Anunnaki, who were doing the backbreaking work in the mines, mutinied about three hundred thousand years ago. On top of the unrelenting drudgery of the mining operations, difficulties for these extraterrestrial colonists had increased due to climate changes.
Enlil, the commander in chief, wanted to punish the workers for their rebellion. He called an Assembly of the Great Anunnaki, which included his father, Anu, who was more sympathetic to the plight of the Anunnaki miners. He saw that the work of the mutineers was very hard and that their distress was considerable. One Sumerian text reported, “The load is excessive, it is killing us! Our work is too hard, the trouble too much! So every single one of us gods has agreed to complain to Ellil [Enlil].”
Enlil wondered aloud if there wasn’t another way to obtain gold. At this point, Enki suggested that a primitive worker, called an Adamu, be created to take over the difficult work. Enki pointed out that a primitive humanoid—what we call
Homo erectus
or a closely related hominid—was quite prevalent in Abzu (Africa), where he maintained a laboratory.
Just as today we furiously debate animal experimentation, gene splicing, and cloning, the Anunnaki also debated the morality of tinkering with a species. Anunnaki leaders argued, “Creation in the hands of the Father of All Beginning alone is held!”
Enki counterargued that producing a hybrid—half Anunnaki and half primitive human—would not be an act of creation but merely improving the existing breed. Many people today believe that Sitchin and his followers are claiming that aliens created humans. Instead, the process as described in the Sumerian tablets was only a breeding program similar to what has been done with various animals by mankind to improve the stock.
And so Enki’s plan to create a worker race in Africa was approved by the Anunnaki Assembly, and the Anunnaki created a race in their image. Sound like a familiar refrain? One of the most puzzling verses in the Bible, Genesis 1:26, assures readers that there is only one true God, but then quotes God in the plural, stating, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness …” Could the plural gods here be the Anunnaki?